Overlooked Mistakes while Optimizing WordPress for Conversion Rate

User-experience
still eventually boils down to one thing, i.e., Conversion.

Broadly speaking,
conversion rate is The most tangible way of mapping ROI in UX.
For developers’ /designers’ clients, that’s the endgame. That’s
the one thing that matters, regardless of what anyone preaches.

By definition,
conversion rate is the percentage of website visitors who carry out a
task that invariably benefits the site owner. It’s quantifiable
and yes, it can be optimized.Conversions can be improved
by “widening the funnel” so to speak (increasing the number
of landing pages and/or site traffic to give you a statistic edge);
or by rewiring the interface and creating an
experience so compelling it drives visitors to convert.

In this article,
we will take a look at some of the ways you can optimize the
conversion rate on a WordPress website. Why WordPress? Because
you are likely already on it (more than 1/4th
of all websites on internet are), and because the steps outlined
below are easier to carry-out with an admin interface as intuitive,
friendly, and freeing as WordPress’.

1.Understanding Goals and Journeys

Read, subscribe,
download (anything), sign up, buy… What is it that you want
your users to do? Or more specifically, what do you need your
users to do first?

I have seen so
many great designs fail spectacularly by trying to achieve everything
at once. Not only is it not possible, it’s overwhelming. It’s
distracting, annoying, and reeks of desperation.

You must be
familiar with (and usually irritated) with popups by now. Here, look
at these:

This is from Wall
Street Journal:

I came to read an article about a 93 year old woman and ALS,
WallStreet!

WhatArmy’s
blog:

Oy
Vey!

These popped up
before I could even get a chance to go through the content.
Apparently there free t-shirt is more important than someone
looking up their service.

Reebok Crossfit:

This
shows up the second I arrive on the products’ catalogue page.

And these are
the examples from the good websites!

Overlooking the
message, the popup does not tie in with the user-journey and
is likely guilty of driving visitors away. So even if
WhatArmy’s goal is distributing free t-shirts to their subscribers,
they are preventing people from looking up their own service. This is
the highest-echelon of self-blockingif there
ever was one.

Take a look at
this:

This
shows up when I am done reading the entire post

This popup isn’t
designed with zings and sparkles or anything, but it has a long
message (the blog’s entire audience is made of avid-readers)
but it ties up rather well with the user-journey. Instead of
being thrown in the user’s face the second they arrive on the page
(Is that how you welcome visitors at your home?), it waits to
showcase the relevant message at the right time.

For
the sake of effective CRO, you have to trace back the first steps of
UX:

Identify
the goal (your business goal, that is)

Create
a User-journey that prompts
(not pushes.
Prompts!)
users in
that direction

Map
the journey in the interface

Don’t
clutter your website with an almighty-chaos of messages.
You have their attention, but that’s no excuse for exploding with
excitement. Embrace the attention and use it to propel visitors
forward. Whether it’s a pop-up, above-the-fold design, forms and
CTAs, you cannot hope to do everything through a single, limited page
at once. Prioritize
your goals, and create an interface that revolves around those. One
page at a time… Once you know which page is best suited to
accomplish which goal, you can use plugins like Icegram or
OptinMonster to create custom popups or landing pages.

Once you have
analytical insight into problem areas, work to fix those and test
them with A/B multivariate testing, straight from Google Analytics.

This is how it’s
done.

Test Scenario:
I found out that my landing page isn’t getting many pageviews. So I
am testing my “original” landing page against 2 variations on
pageview metric, with a 99% confidence threshold (for
accuracy).

2. Fill in the
fields to create an experiment. Note: If you have eCommerce enabled,
you can experiment on Revenue and Transaction pages too.

Note that for
this to work you need to have Google Analytics code added to Original
+ All Variation pages (supports up to 10 variations only).

You then
get a choice to manually insert the experiment code on Original page
(it goes in your theme’s header.php template file).

Or you can use a
plugin like Google
Content Experiments (yes it works in 2016 even though it hasn’t
been updated for so long) and use it to paste the code. Make sure to
read the installation notes as the plugin used to have some issues
with certain themes, but the author has given 1-2 lines of code in
the installation notes that could fix the problem in a jiffy.

The other option
is to send the code to the webmaster tools, which I haven’t tried
yet.

Review and
start the experiment. You’ll then see this message:

You’ll see the
results in 24-48 hours based on the confidence threshold you set for
the experiment.

Landing pages
used to be synonymous with the homepage in the previous years, but
that’s not the case today, despite many people still following the
route to creating homepages and Single-page Web-apps using landing
page best practices. That’s well and good, but now the CTA buttons
on other parts of website and links from your advertising initiatives
should take visitors directly to what they came here for.

Landing page is
the narrowest point of your funnel: A clutter (and distraction) free,
simply put-together page which clearly describes what you’re
offering and why users should be interested in it.

Services like
Inbound Now are built
especially for WordPress to let you create landing pages as well as
track them for results (without additional analytics’ integration)
via split testing. This involves in-built landing page and CTA
templates that you can use to create your own specialized page, 3rd
party lead generation services like MailChimp, etc.

If you are unsure
about designing your own page, you can check out the vast numbers
of templates and themes built for WordPress landing pages instead on
Envato marketplace (just search for what you need). JavaScript is
great but make sure to use it in moderation, and keep the design
simple and distraction-free to keep the attention focused on your
product.

4.Performance Optimization

This wouldn’t
even be on the list if it weren’t for many clients’ severe lack
of awareness on this topic, which is baffling in 21st
century.

Website speed
(how fast your pages load when a visitor arrives there for the first
time) is called performance. In the age of Instant
Gratification, no-one thinks it’s worthwhile to wait for a silly
page to load. It’s frustrating and distracting, and frankly your
users have better things to do than stare at your “loading”
animation. It should also be common knowledge that website loading
speed can also impact your search-results ranking.

Apply the 80-20
rule here: Optimize the heck out of your WordPress website’s
frontend and backend to improve perceived performance (80% effort)
and querying times (20% effort). Any WordPress development company
worth its salt will focus on both, and it takes some
tinkering.

First, find out
how deep you’re in by testing your website URL on Pingdom or
PageSpeed Insight. Once you have your performance score and an entire
list of everything that’s adding to your load-time, roll up your
sleeves and get to work addressing those. The easiest ways to
optimize performance can be found all over the internet: caching
(plugins like W3 Total Cache), CDN (like MaxCDN, CloudFlare, etc.),
and image and Gzip compression (EWWW Image Optimizer, WP Smush.it,
etc.), but it also goes beyond that, and you will need to hire
WordPress developer for the real thing.

You will have to
optimize your query load times and database for a speedier experience
overall (especially if you’re working with high-traffic and
membership-based system), and you’ll need to minify your stylesheet
and JavaScript (some caching plugins have this feature built-in).
Keep the number of plugins and widgets to a bare minimum, based on
requirement. The fewer plugins you have, the lesser the number of
scripts your page has to load.

5. UX pointers:

Say no to
auto-forwarding sliders and embrace dynamically rendered and
personalized banners instead.

Keep the
wireframe as simple and familiar as possible. You can go nuts on the
details, but the layout itself should put people at ease so they can
find what they need.

If you’re
an eCommerce vendor, look up Tablet-first
design for real conversions.

Endnote

CRO on a
WordPress website is actually easier than anywhere else, simply
because the platform and the community of developers will provide you
with most of the tools and resources you need to get the job done. As
long as you keep a clear head and are willing to put in a few hours
of research and effort, you should be alright.

And this is my
parting advice for everyone: This post is advice, not word-of-law.
Short forms, images, cards and corporate-ified blocks of text may
seem indubitable, but they might not be the correct choice in your
case. Evaluate your ideal users for the best mix of right elements
and keep Implementing >> Testing >> Improving

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